The image of a hurricane-spawning smokestack was used to promote the film, An Inconvenient Truth.

Author of the theory that global warming breeds stronger hurricanes recants his view

Noted Hurricane Expert Kerry Emanuel has publicly reversed his stance on the impact of Global Warming on Hurricanes. Saying "The models are telling us something quite different from what nature seems to be telling us," Emanuel has released new research indicating that even in a rapidly warming world, hurricane frequency and intensity will not be substantially affected.

"The results surprised me," says Emanuel, one of the media's most quoted figures on the topic.

The view that global warming has limited impact on hurricane strength has been previously reported in numerous DailyTech articles.

Emanuel, professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT, is the author of numerous books and research papers on climate change. For over twenty years, he has argued that global warming breeds more frequent and stronger storms. In fact, his 1987 paper is often cited as the first appearance of the theory itself.

His 2005 research -- published just one month before Hurricane Katrina struck -- made world headlines, and was heralded as the "final proof" that Global Warming was already having severe impacts on daily lives. Overnight, Emanuel became a media darling. The following year, Time Magazine named him to their "100 People Who Shape Our World" list.

In 2006, Al Gore used an image of a smokestack spawning a hurricane to promote his movie, An Inconvenient Truth.

Emanuel's newest work, co-authored with two other researchers, simulates hurricane conditions nearly 200 years in the future. The research -- the first to mesh global climate models with small-scale high-resolution simulations of individual storms -- found that while storm strength rises slightly in some areas, it falls in others -- and the total number of worldwide storms actually declines slightly.

Emanuel's reversal is certain to reverberate through political circles as well; many politicians and candidates are using the hurricane threat to compel action on climate change.

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Well, this relates to an explanation of past total power dissipation, not prediction of frequencies or intensities. And he doesn't say the GW had no role. But he is explicit about the consistency of the results of his new technique and previous studies:

quote: Thus, the present results are broadly consistent with those of global model studies in that both generally show an increased frequency of very intense storms, but some tendency toward a reduction in the overall frequency of events in the Southern Hemisphere. The simplicity of the intensity model and natural selection technique employed here allows us to draw a fairly definitive conclusion about why the frequency of events declines in some places in our simulations.

quote: the greater part of the large global increase in power dissipation over the past 27 yr cannot be ascribed to global warming

is not saying that none of it can be ascribed to global warming. It it is similar to this 2005 caveat:

quote: The above discussion suggests that only part of the observed increase in tropical cyclone power dissipation is directly due to increased SSTs; the rest can only be explained by changes in other factors known to influence hurricane intensity, such as vertical wind shear

And he didn't say in 2005 that his models proved anything, he said

quote: My results suggest that future warming may lead to an upward trend in tropical cyclone destructive potential

Well, he wrote a lot. But I wish you'd give quotes of what he actually said.

Here's a press release that went with his 2005 Nature paper - perhaps his period of greatest prominence, The most you'll find is

quote: Also of concern, he says, is that the increases in storm intensity are mirrored by increases in the average temperatures at the surface of the tropical oceans, suggesting that this warming is responsible for the hurricanes' greater power. Since hurricanes depend on warm water to form and build, Emanuel warns that global climate change might increase the effect of hurricanes still further in coming years.

The first sentence might sound like he's linking AGW and hurricanes. But he's just pointing to a correlation between observed SST rises and hurricane power. The AGW link is possible, but he's not claiming it is proved.